Most claims in Zillow home valuation patent deemed invalid

A patent review board has ruled that more than two dozen claims made in a Zillow patent for an automatic valuation of a property are "unpatentable" and anticipated or obvious in view of "prior art" — information or practices already in public circulation when the patent was filed.
The decision, by the patent trial and appeal board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, was the result of a challenge from enterprise software company MicroStrategy Inc. But the ruling could come into play in deciding the outcome of a lawsuit filed by Zillow against rival Trulia last year, a week before Trulia's initial public offering.
In its lawsuit, Zillow alleged that the automated property valuations Trulia displayed on its site, dubbed Trulia Estimates, infringed on a patent filed in 2006 and i...